The ISU Bengal has reported that Idaho State University’s Associate Professor of Anatomy and Anthropology and well known Bigfoot advocate, Dr. Jeffery Meldrum, claims that dogs are currently being trained to hunt down the elusive, ape-like creatures.
Dr. Meldrum — who has been featured on the History Channel, the SyFy Channel — said he doesn’t take on faith that HAIRY HOMINIDS are real, but based on the body of evidence he has examined, he does think the creature exists. For him his odyssey into the unknown began 14 years ago when he found a fresh footprint in southeastern Washington:
“That was what set the hook as far as embarking on a more systematic and focused consideration of the question from a research perspective.”
According to Dr. Meldrum — who currently has over 200 footprint casts of alleged BIGFOOT prints — the case of SASQUATCH is particularly interesting because of his background is in the evolution of human locomotion:
“The proposition of another biped –- perhaps an early hominid or an ape –- that had evolved the same bipedal adaptation as humans is an intriguing question. I was already familiar with footprint evidence for early humans walking, so I recognized features and possibilities attributed to Sasquatch… I thought I could make a significant contribution to the resolution to this issue from the perspective of systematic evaluation of footprint evidence because I’m very familiar with that type of data. So I started collecting as many examples of the footprints as I could.”
Dr. Meldrum has also traveled around the world to study Sasquatch. One of his more interesting expeditions — which was financed by the History Channel — took him to the Hubei province in China to search for evidence of a legendary creature called the YEREN, which translates into “wild man” and has a similar description to Sasquatch. Dr. Meldrum retold an account that a Chinese park ranger who claimed to have seen a Yeren gave him:
“The ranger was patrolling the park and spied at several hundred yards, a reddish brown hair covered figure sprawled on a boulder in the sun in the morning hours. The ranger called out to it, it sat up, looked at him and instead of it being a long snouted bear it was a flat faced man-like figure that got up and walked into the forest. The ranger went after it and tracked it some distance to a stream where it left nice tracks in the mud. He went to get the materials and returned to make a cast of the feet. One of the objectives of the trip was to examine these casts.”
Dr. Meldrum was astounded when the ranger opened up a suitcase and unwrapped the casts. The prints were very familiar to him andthe park ranger would of had no frame of reference as to what these footprints would look like making a hoax unlikely:
“I was stunned because these footprints were virtually identical to the examples I have here in my laboratory.”
In what is perhaps the most intriguing revelation of the interview, Dr. Meldrum claimed that in the U.S. they are working on training search and recovery dogs to track Sasquatch. He said one of the biggest criticisms of Sasquatch is there is no body, and the only way to get a body would be to track one down and kill it or for someone to stumble upon a body, which he doesn’t believe is likely to occur any time soon:
“Given their intelligence, this is probably going to be a very unlikely scenario. The next best thing would be to have a trace of that organism with DNA, and that would come from hair or feces.”
Meldrum said the dogs are generally used to identify humans and human remains, but can be trained to identify almost anything. He claimed they he had seen one of these dogs check what was suspected as being Sasquatch feces, and react in an unexpected fashion:
“They get wind of this feces, which would either be from bear or Sasquatch, because it was filled with black ants, and the dogs had a fear response to it. This is a very unusual response because those same dogs would walk by bear feces with no response. This enthused one of the handlers, and she has agreed to train a dog to great ape hair and tissue with the presumption that Sasquatch falls close to the variation of gorillas, chimps and apes.”
Dr. Meldrum is excited about the potential for scientific discovery that may be closer at had due to these newly trained dogs:
“Once we have a dog that is at hand, if fresh footprints are found within about 12 hours, we can take the dogs to the site and imprint them with the scent, presuming the tracks are authentic… I’m not just about collecting footprints; we’re also approaching this as a question of wildlife biology. What is this creature’s role in the biological community?”
